Dragon Magazine had this amazing little quirk where it often included fun little homebrew games as inserts you could cut out and play with your friends, and a lot of them were actually pretty brilliant.

Case in point, The Awful Green Things From Outer Space, originally featured in Issue #28 of Dragon Magazine way back in 1979.

TAGTFOS is a two-player game set on the spaceship Znutar, which hosts a diverse crew of alien species. The ship becomes overrun by rapidly-multiplying green monsters, and the crew must now scramble to find weapons that can actually kill the green menace, or succumb to its ever-spawning, maneating brood.

Every member of the crew has a unique name, rank, and illustration for its chit, and each crewman starts the game in one of several preassigned rooms on the spaceship. Once the crew is in place, the monsters get to spawn in a random part of the ship–the monsters come in the form of Eggs which can grow into Babies, which can grow into Adults, which can lay Eggs.

Once the stage is set, the nearest crewman is forced to “discover” the infestation, and the mayhem begins!

The highlight of this game (besides the monsters growing out of control and overrunning the ship in record time) is the weapon system. The crew can use all sorts of improvised weapons, collected from specific rooms around the ship. But the first time a crewman uses a weapon on a monster, it is permanently assigned a randomly drawn “weapon effect.”

See, that nifty laser gun you just picked up might vaporize the monster…or it might make it grow. Or, even better, it may blow it to 1D6 pieces which can then grow into new monsters! So the crew spends most of the game trying to discover what each weapon does, in the hope of finding one that can actually be used to thin out the ever-growing horde, which is meanwhile dogpiling onto hapless crewman, eating them alive, and using their precious bodily fluids to produce even more monsters.

Of course, if things look hopeless, the crew can always abandon ship! Then they get to consult a random table of events to see if they even make it home alive or not. In my last game, my six survivors were whittled down to two survivors after 5 years of interstellar wandering and two bouts with Martian Cholera.

If you can get a copy of this, do so, and play it with another friend who likes quirky, twisted, and slightly complex games. It looks intimidating at first, but it doesn’t take long to learn the basics of the game, and it’s a blast whether you’re playing the hungry hungry monsters or the hapless hapless crewman.

Time for bed. Uncle Mac out.